owing
and acute feeling of animosity toward himself. Since the day--or
night--fate had drawn that great, black curtain over his life, shutting
out his sun, he had been drifting; he had been floating along on
currents of the least resistance, making no fight, and, in the
completeness of his grief and despair, allowing himself to disintegrate
physically as well as mentally. He had sorrowed with himself; he had
told himself that everything worth having was gone; but now, for the
first time, he cursed himself. To-day--these few hundred yards out in
the snow--had come as a test. They had proved his weakness. He had
degenerated into less than a man! He was....

He clenched his hands inside his thick mittens, and a rage burned within
him like a fire. Go with Father Roland? Go up into that world where he
knew that the one great law of life was the survival of the fittest?
Yes, he _would go_! This body and brain of his needed their
punishment--and they should have it! He would go. And his body would
fight for it, or die. The thought gave him an atrocious satisfaction. He
was filled with a sudden contempt for himself. If Father Roland had
known, he would have uttered a paean of joy.

Out of the darkness of the humour into which he had fallen, David was
suddenly flung by a low and ferocious growl. He had stepped around a
young balsam that stood like a seven-foot ghost in his path, and found
himself face to face with a beast that was cringing at the butt of a
thick spruce. It was a dog. The animal was not more than four or five
short paces from him, and was chained to the tree. David surveyed him
with sudden interest, wondering first of all why he was larger than the
other dogs. As he lay crouched there against his tree, his ivory fangs
gleaming between half-uplifted lips, he looked like a great wolf. In the
other dogs David had witnessed an avaricious excitement at the approach
of men, a hungry demand for food, a straining at leash ends, a whining
and snarling comradeship. Here he saw none of those things. The big,
wolf-like beast made no sound after that first growl, and made no
movement. And yet every muscle in his body seemed gathered in a tense
readiness to spring, and his gleaming fangs threatened. He was
ferocious, and yet shrinking; ready to leap, and yet afraid. He was like
a thing at bay--a hunted creature that had been prisoned. And then David
noticed that he had but one good eye. It was bloodshot, balefully alert,
and